NAPLAN’s Numeracy Test

NAPLAN has been much in the news of late, with moves for the tests to go online while simultaneously there have been loud calls to scrap the tests entirely. And, the 2018 NAPLAN tests have just come and gone. We plan to write about all this in the near future, and in particular we’re curious to see if the 2018 tests can top 2017’s clanger. For now, we offer a little, telling tidbit about ACARA.

In 2014, we submitted FOI applications to ACARA for the 2012-2014 NAPLAN Numeracy tests. This followed a long and bizarre but ultimately successful battle to formally obtain the 2008-2011 tests, now available here: some, though far from all, of the ludicrous details of that battle are documented here. Our requests for the 2012-2014 papers were denied by ACARA, then denied again after ACARA’s internal “review”. They were denied once more by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. We won’t go into OAIC’s decision here, except to state that we regard it as industry-capture idiocy. We lacked the energy and the lawyers, however, to pursue the matter further.

Here, we shall highlight one hilarious component of ACARA’s reasoning. As part of their review of our FOI applications, ACARA was obliged under the FOI Act to consider the public interest arguments for or against disclosure. In summary, ACARA’s FOI officer evaluated the arguments for disclosure as follows:

Promoting the objects of the FOI Act — 1/10

Informing a debate on a matter of public importance — 1/10

Promoting effective oversight of public expenditure — 0/10

Yes, the scoring is farcical and self-serving, but let’s ignore that.

ACARA’s FOI officer went on to “total” the public interest arguments in favour of disclosure. They obtained a “total” of 2/10.

Seriously.

We then requested an internal review, pointing out, along with much other nonsense, ACARA’s FOI officer’s dodgy scoring and dodgier arithmetic. The internal “review” was undertaken by ACARA’s CEO. His “revised” scoring was as follows:

Promoting the objects of the FOI Act — 1/10

Informing a debate on a matter of public importance — 1/10

Promoting effective oversight of public expenditure — 0/10

And his revised total? Once again, 2/10.

Seriously.

These are the clowns in charge of testing Australian students’ numeracy.

3 Replies to “NAPLAN’s Numeracy Test”

ACARA only knows what was/is meant to be achieved by not releasing NAPLAN papers after the event. From a pragmatic perspective, I would have thought the reason FOR making them public was pretty obvious:

Parent: my student did badly on X.
Teacher: OK, let’s look at which questions were assessing X
Other Teachers: so, did we teach X badly, did we teach X at all before the testing date, did this question really test X, do we need to think about dedicating more time to X.